Yesterday continued my project looking at the Siderfin hits on the FMP website and I have completed Page 34 and working on Page 35. I will soon have to begin working on the Blake Newsletter so it will be into April before I complete this task. But already I could write up the 5th generation of the Siderfin Family and may work at that alternately over the next little while just to keep up to date with the actual revision of the Siderfin book.
Almost to the Spring Equinox and with daylight savings in place it is brighter in the evening. Given the choice I would like to have Standard Time permanently if we ever move to a fixed time (i.e. no changing the clocks twice a year forward and back). I like the darker evenings. The snow is starting to pull back from the buildings and the fences; generally a first sign that spring is on its way. Still quiet though; not that many birds as it is still cool in the night. But the squirrels are out and about. The huge piles of snow are still with us and we need a good hot sunny day to make a dent in that (i.e. maybe six or seven degrees celsius with no clouds. But I am patient waiting for spring. The mud season that precedes the planting time is not the easiest time of the year for sure. Lots of land; so lots of mud. But it is a delight for the little ones to finally get out of the house and play in the great outdoors without heavy clothes. Winter is hard on little ones.
Yesterday working through the pages I did not find anything significantly new to me which is often the case; just a few gems every now and then to help me in this pace backwards from my known line looking for any sign of the other lines that came down from Robert (William 2, John 1). He had such a large family and also his son William's family was large. But only the daughters of William's children multiplied into the future. Interesting really how a paternal family line dies out even when the number of sons is large - but I can see that in my own family with my brothers not having any sons and the sisters (and myself) not having any female granddaughters. Two lines stretching way back into the past of the British Isles end with us although there are other siblings of our grandparents and great grandparents who do carry those signatures into the future so not lost just lost from our line. DNA has certainly made genealogy a much more exciting pursuit in my eyes and over the last twenty years it has become the accepted norm to have DNA results in the one-name studies. Interesting to see these ancient lines come down from thousands of years ago; one can imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors making the trek across Doggerland into the now British Isles once joined to mainland Europe. In my case that is true of the Blake y-DNA line carried by my brothers and our mt-DNA line carried by all of us from our maternal grandmother. I do have results on some of the other lines feeding down into our generation and most are ancient to the British Isles thus far but we do have Huguenot lines coming from France. Anything else is still shrouded in time but over the years to come more unraveling and revealing perhaps of our ancient heritage.
Today I continue working on the Siderfin hits but I need to start thinking about the Blake Newsletter. This will be Volume 12, Issue 2 and I still have not yet made it to the Family History Library to look at the Somerset Subsidies although I did do some work on the Subsidies which I have. I also looked at the new Devon Subsidies which I purchased and they pertain to the article I wrote in the last Newsletter which discussed James Blake of Knights Enham and the suggestion that he founded the Blake line found in Devon which I believe to be incorrect - individuals with the Blake surname came to both Devon and Cornwall in the early 1500s but one can not discount the possibility that some of these Blake lines found in Devon and Somerset may have come from the Calne Blake family where there is once again folklore that this is so including the Pedigree Chart produced by the College of Arms for the Blake family (circa 1690 with additions into the 1700s). Charlou Dolan, a Blake researcher, has produced a chart on the descendants of Robert Blake who was mentioned clearly in his father's will (Richard Blake 1522 and Richard was mentioned in his father Robert Blake's will of 1521 (he was fairly elderly at his death)) and I will likely do that but also look at Devon and the information gleaned from the 1524-27 Subsidy of Devon listing the Blake families of Devon. I will also organize any new Blake y-DNA members. I do not do anything with the mtDNA Blake results and will leave that for an adventuresome person in the future. The autosomal DNA results can be rather interesting but again I leave that for another in the future.
Today we are promised a little snow but it is cooler yesterday and minus 3 degrees celsius feeling like minus 6 degrees celsius. The humidity is high and it is cloudy. Not much melting today. The hills of snow have quite a bit of ice under them now from the melting. Good for the earth for sure; lots of moisture. It was pretty dry by the end of the summer last year.
On to breakfast and the day.
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